The Skeleton Lord, Three Ingredients, and a Few Too Many Beers

This one starts, as all the best stories do, with a few beers.

When I was younger, my dad used to read me these "choose your own adventure" books. You know the format — you're the hero, every couple of pages you make a choice, pick wrong and you die horribly, pick right and you get to die horribly a few pages later. I loved them. And then, like most childhood things, they quietly vanished from my brain. Fifteen, twenty years go by and I couldn't have told you the name of a single one, or even what the covers looked like.

Until one night, a few beers deep, I had a thought: I wonder if AI could find them for me.

The world's worst book description

I'd love to tell you I gave it rich, vivid detail to work with. I did not. My entire memory of these books amounted to roughly the following:

• It was a choose your own adventure book.
• At some point there's a skeleton lord guy thing you have to kill.
• You do it by knocking him down and putting a combination of different ingredients over his eyes.
• Right at the end it's revealed you were carrying one ingredient too many — you couldn't just use all of them, that wouldn't work — so the whole book comes down to a 1-in-3 guess.

That's it. That was the brief. A shitty description of a book I could barely remember in my own head, handed over at whatever-o'clock in the morning with zero evidence.

It went back and forth quite a few times. I'd say "no, that's not it", Claude (Opus 4.1, for the record) would come back with another candidate, we'd dig a little deeper each time. And then it landed on it: City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone — one of the old Fighting Fantasy books. I pulled up a summary, and there it was. The skeleton. The ingredients. The eyes. The horrible final guess.

I was absolutely gobsmacked. I'd tried googling this myself before and got nowhere — turns out "book where you put ingredients on a skeleton's eyes" is not a winning search query. I suppose I could have asked on a book forum, but those places always feel half-dead, and I didn't fancy waiting months for a reply that might never come. Instead, one late evening and a conversation was enough. Even my dad couldn't remember the books, so as far as I was concerned this thing was gone forever.

Can I play it?

Naturally, being several beers in at this point, my next question was even stupider: "Could I turn this into a real text-based adventure game that I could actually play?"

Opus whirred away for a few minutes and came back with: yes, absolutely — and better than that, someone already has. A developer in Sweden had built the whole thing and open-sourced it on GitHub: richelbilderbeek/city_of_thieves.

Brilliant. I jumped straight into the repo to get it set up, and immediately ran into a wall — it's a C++ project, and C++ is very much not my day job. I tried to build it, the build did not build, and I sat there staring at compiler errors like they'd personally offended me.

And then it hit me. Hold on. Why am I doing this part?

Claude cracks the build

I put Opus back on the case and watched an AI agent dive headfirst into a codebase neither of us had ever seen before. It read through the project, worked out what was wrong, fixed all the compile issues one by one, and got the thing to build. I just sat there with my beer.

This was the part that genuinely amazed me. All my previous experience with AI had been in projects I already knew inside out — very prescribed usage, me asking for targeted little changes to code I could have written myself. This was something else entirely: an unfamiliar codebase, a vague goal, and the agent just... handled it. And it bloody well worked.

The game ran. And it was exactly how I remembered the book. The streets of Port Blacksand, the terrible decisions, the lot.

Though I'll be honest — I remember the book being easier. I'm starting to suspect my dad just made all the swords hurt a lot less to help me out.

The point, if there is one

I went into that evening expecting absolutely nothing, and instead I got back a piece of my childhood I was sure I'd lost. There's something genuinely magical to me about being able to throw an AI agent at a problem this fuzzy — "a book I half-remember from twenty years ago, and also please make it a video game" — and have it blow straight past my expectations.

Tools like this didn't exist when I forgot those books. I'm very glad they exist now.

Just maybe don't wait until 4am and three beers to find out.